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AppFog Promotes PaaS

It's hard telling just how many PaaS vendors there are out there. I found one list that includes 20, so that's a starting point. Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Service Elastic Beanstock, Google Apps, and Force.com PaaS from Salesforce.com are all, of course, prominent players.

Currently, when People think about PaaS, they associate it with the Web development community, but Lucas Carlson, founder and CEO of AppFog has a much grander view of PaaS and its role in the cloud. In his vision, PaaS provides the last mile to the cloud, and will expand the cloud's presence by bringing many more developers to it, while promoting SaaS and IaaS opportunities.

"Clearly, to deploy large SaaS implementations, you need PaaS technology to power them," Carlson declares, adding "PaaS is the best sales tool for IaaS." He goes on to say that PaaS is more "ground-shifting" and provides greater opportunities than virtualization, and his company already has "tens of thousands of customers." All this, and the golden age of PaaS is just beginning. As he puts it, "To me, it's a Greenfield opportunity."

You'd never guess this guy is the boss of a PaaS company, would you?

For its part, AppFog recently took the wraps off an add-on program for third-party service providers that provisions the accounts purchased by developers via a single interface, and displays partner information for the customer to "easily integrate additional functionality from these third-party services into the applications they build on the AppFog platform. This will make it easier still for developers to deploy and scale web-based applications without having to become part-time IT support on the side."

Carlson believes that the PaaS company with the best ecosystem will be victorious in the market, and toward that end, AppFog has added Mongolab--which will offer its hosted MongoDB to the AppFog community--and New Relic, which says its Web application performance tool gives developers "deep, 24x7 visibility from the end-user experience all the way to a line of application code, which is a crucial capability for developers using AppFog for deploying apps to the cloud."